MEW, the Magic Exploration Wand, is a mobile system for Child Life Specialists (CLS) to use in their work with children at pediatric hospitals. MEW was developed and studied at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta's Egleston hospital. With MEW, mobile phones and in-world tangible tags are used to go on a scavenger hunt or create a virtual scrapbook.
Child Life Specialists (CLS’s) are medical professionals who use activities to educate, comfort, entertain and distract children in hospitals. Adapting to a shifting cast of children, context and mediating activities requires CLS’s to be experts at a kind of articulation work. This expertise means CLS’s are well equipped to help technologists introduce child-facing interventions to the hospital. MEW was developed to explore the role of activities in shaping CLS-child interactions and to highlight the potential of working with CLS's to the HCI community. In the course of our work, we developed the Activity-Based Interaction framework to the describe structural components of CLS activities.
